IN THE GARDEN: New book traces the history of the American garden

Sunday

Jul 31, 2011 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2011 at 12:53 AM

Gardening expresses both the individual and the culture. At the same time today’s form of gardening follows a history connected to other gardeners in generations past. That’s the message of a new book by garden designer and historian Wade Graham called “American Garden.”

Thomas Mickey

Gardening expresses both the individual and the culture. At the same time today’s form of gardening follows a history connected to other gardeners in generations past.

That’s the message of a new book by garden designer and historian Wade Graham called “American Garden.” He uses the English definition of garden that includes also the landscape.

Graham traces the history of the garden in America from Jefferson’s Monticello to the new High Line Park that just opened on old elevated rail tracks in New York. His writing flows easily as you move through decades and then centuries to mark important garden moments along the way.

What I liked about the book is that Graham creates a context for the narrative through the personalities we meet. He introduces the reader to many gardeners, including of course landscape designers and architects, who, he argues, became the dominant figures of the American garden aesthetic as we know it.

But other gardeners are important as well. For example, novelist Edith Wharton, the high priestess of the Gilded Age, contributed a return to the more formal garden, specifically Italian, in her garden called the Mount in the hills of western Massachusetts.

Her contemporary, landscape architect Charles Platt agreed that garden design ought to have that formal look, rejecting in his New Hampshire garden design, much like English garden writer William Robinson and English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll had done as well, the elaborate Victorian flower beds.

Such became key moments in the history of American gardening.

Graham devotes several pages to Martha Stewart because of her skill at making the garden the new status symbol. For example, on Long Island, New York new money enabled elaborate, formal landscapes on properties whose owners intended to outshine the neighbor’s.

The revered father of the American park Frederick Law Olmsted assumes an important role in the American garden.

Graham writes: “If Jefferson’s garden was created in the service of enlightenment and Downing’s in the service of domesticity, Olmsted and Vaux’s was created in the service of therapy.”

Olmsted saw his park as the way for the urban dweller to feel refreshed and renewed. That was a key moment in the history of the American garden. We remember it today when gardening provides escape and relaxation.

Though the lawn threatens the environment, Graham admits the continued importance of the lawn for the American garden because it is stubbornly and deeply lodged in the American psyche.

Through all the centuries of the American garden the lawn has been the one enduring feature, a relic of the English garden still with us.

In praise of new horticultural and agriculture movements with their focus on local food, Graham writes that the mind-set today is “pro-urban and pro-nature – in sum, pro-garden.”

I like that expression, “pro-garden.” Today it is a garden that helps you survive, especially by growing your own herbs and vegetables.

You see in this book how different forms of the garden emerged in America over time. Graham reminds us the garden, like a ping-pong ball, went from the natural to the formal look, and back again. Sometimes it became even a mix of the two.

The book ends with a summary of the book’s thesis: gardens are “expressions of self, and self-image, signals meant to be seen and understood.” People make gardens both to enjoy them and to show others who they are.

Without question this book will help you see your garden in a new way. As a gardener, it’s great to share such a history.

Thomas Mickey is a master gardener from Quincy and professor emeritus at Bridgewater State University. You may reach him at www.americangardening.net.